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Carly Fiorina Says Government Needs a Way To "Work Around" Encryption (dailydot.com)
Patrick O'Neill writes: Carly Fiorina wants the government to be able to "work around" encryption to aid intelligence agencies and law enforcement in their investigations, she said on Monday. The Republican presidential candidate and former HP CEO shifted the focus of her campaign to national security two days before the last Republican debate of 2015. Fiorina is the latest but not the first presidential candidate to weigh in on the encryption debate that has taken on a new life since terrorist attacks in Paris and California.
Then they didn't do enough. The 4th Amendment is around for good reason. The police and government are not entitled to every bit of your information despite what fascists and their gullible idiots like yourself believe.
Some bad people are going to get away with their crimes because upholding due process and the 4th amendment are far more important to having a free society instead of a police state. It sounds like North Korea is the place you want to live.
I just read a great essay (PDF format) by Phillip Rogaway which strongly argues exactly that we need to develop new kinds of cryptography which are aimed squarely at making mass surveillance impossible. Once mass surveillance has been shut down completely, then maybe we can talk about ways for law enforcement to "work around" encryption in very limited and controlled ways[1]. But as long as mass surveillance is feasible, this is a complete non-starter, because any mechanism for bypassing cryptographic security will be used to increase the penetration of mass surveillance. And at this point I don't think we can settle for purely political means of shutting down mass surveillance. Political restrictions on surveillance are necessary, but not sufficient. We also need technology that makes it difficult and expensive, because if it's cheap and easy it can always be done on the sly.
[1] Once mass surveillance is out of the way, then we can talk about "workarounds". But it's crucial that the workarounds not compromise the security of the result. At present, I don't think we have any cryptographic technology that enables controlled, limited access without compromising security in normal operation. Further, I don't think any such technology is possible. But until mass surveillance is shut down we can't even discuss it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I'm beginning to think that governments are like users that tech support encounters.
The completely ineffective ones can do harm but usually wind up keeping themselves from doing too much harm.
The partly effective ones (the ones who think they know it all but don't) do a lot of damage as they overestimate their effectiveness and wind up trashing everything.
The completely effective ones don't do any harm but are also so rare as to be nonexistent.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Those aren't "welfare" items but rather items of civilized society.
I would argue that a society with 0 social assistance programs is not a very civilized society. I think you underestimate the amount of order and civility of society that stems in/directly from people being able to get help sometimes when they need it and not go down in flames because of a single adverse event in their lives. That is the whole problem with this point of view: the societal benefits of welfare are often 2+ degrees of separation from the investment, so you assume they do not exist and just whine that you had to pay some tax money and got nothing for it in immediate returns. If you treat it like a transaction where you expect to get an instant return of 10 units of quality of life per $100 of tax money then you are oversimplifying, and I'm not surprised you don't see the value. It is, nonetheless valuable.